Miguel Auza

For nearly four hundred years this town was San Miguel del Mezquital, named for the mesquite trees on the plain. A decree of January 9, 1935 renamed it after General Miguel Auza Arrenechea, a Sombrerete native and veteran of the Reform War and the fight against the French.

Francisco de Ibarra's expedition rode in on September 29, 1554, Saint Michael's day, and met a Zacateco village of some four hundred armed men; interpreters kept the peace. By the early 1600s it was listed as a mining camp, and in the late 19th century more than fifteen silver mines were worked around it. The Revolution hit hard: Orozco's rebels sacked the town in 1912 and burned the municipal archive. Around the main plaza stand the Portal Fernández, once the big house of the San Marcos hacienda, the Portal Aguilera and the parish church of San Miguel.

The town sits at 2,020 metres among prickly pear, mesquite, agave and creosote bush, with frosts and the odd snowfall in winter. Beans and cattle are the living here. Mennonite families arrived from Chihuahua and Durango in 1964 and now number 4,000 to 5,000 people on more than twenty farm camps around La Honda. The September 29 fair for Saint Michael brings home the townspeople who live up north, after nine days of processions from the Guadalupe shrine on the little hill down to the parish church. On May 3, with matlachín and pardo dancers, families hand out "reliquias", meals of asado, soup, rice and beans given to the town in thanks to a saint.